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Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand

Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand
University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press (1999)


This book is part of the "Re-reading the Canon" series, a 20+ volume collection of various feminist interpretations of key thinkers in the Western tradition. Each book features essays on a different philosopher. The Ayn Rand volume will sit alongside those on Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Marx, Nietzsche, and others.

This is the first volume to engage Ayn Rand's thought from feminist perspectives. It includes some reprints, but mostly original articles from scholars and thinkers of international repute, who work in such diverse disciplines as political science, aesthetics, cultural anthropology, English, philosophy, and gender studies.

The anthology was edited by two distinguished Rand scholars: Mimi Reisel Gladstein (author of The Ayn Rand Companion) and Chris Matthew Sciabarra (author of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical).

Barbara Branden's contribution, "Ayn Rand: The Reluctant Feminist," is the lead essay in the volume. It views Ayn Rand's life as a feminist manifesto, even as it focuses on those aspects of her life and thought which were in contradiction to feminism.

Visit the Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand web site to read more about the other contributions in the volume, including Camille Paglia, Susan Brownmiller, Barbara Grizzutti Harrision, Nathaniel Branden, and Joan Kennedy Taylor, among others.

It promises to be one of the most controversial and important books on Ayn Rand ever published.